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Section 001 – Language and Mind.

Prerequisites & Distribution: Only first-year students, including those with sophomore standing, may pre-register for First-Year Seminars. All others need permission of instructor. (3). (HU).

First-Year Seminar

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.

What is the human mind? In this course, we will exploit research into one of the richest and most extensively investigated components of the mind – language – to attempt an answer to this question. Taking as our starting point the theoretical work of Noam Chomsky and his followers, we will examine in detail the nature of the cognitive sciences as well as the place of linguistics as a field within them.

Section 001.

This course will examine the similarities and differences found in the world's languages. The course will begin by examining how historical and genetic relationships between languages are established, theories of the evolution and dispersion of languages across the world, and the role of linguistic typology in comparing linguistic structure across different languages. We will then examine particular language families, looking at both the structural features of the languages and the social and cultural contexts of different language families. Particular emphasis will be given to the indigenous languages of Australia, North and South America, Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, in addition to pidgin and Creole languages and signed languages. We will also compare various (ancient and modern) writing systems used to represent different languages. The remainder of the course will consider issues of linguistic diversity, including the effects of language contact, the relationship between linguistic, cultural and biological diversity ( eco-linguistics ), the impact of language death, and efforts to preserve and maintain endangered and minority languages around the world.

Section 001.

This course is a continuation of Ling. 150. Students will continue to learn to use and recognize selected grammatical structures of American Sign Language (ASL) for use in short spontaneous conversations involving everyday topics. Additional vocabulary is introduced to expand students' communicative skills in ASL conversations. Students will also learn additional ways of forming questions in ASL to enhance skills in using and recognizing a variety of ASL structures. Upon completion of Linguistics 151, students will be able to observe basic courtesies while making introductions, giving directions, and conversing about past, present, and future events in ASL. Regular attendance is essential. Participation in class includes role playing in selected situational activities. Class will meet two days, two hours a day. Three hours of lecture and one hour of conversation per week.

Section 001.

Edward Sapir said: "Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved – nothing short of a finished form of expression for all communicable experience. This form may be endlessly varied by the individual without thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is constantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations."

At about the same time (circa 1920), Krazy Kat said:

True, all true. As Krazy suggests, this "massive and inclusive art" is
also the information bottleneck of the human condition. A vast amount of our knowledge, including virtually everything we learn in formal education, comes to us through Language. Consequently, learning to analyze language, in ways that work for all languages, and to describe it objectively, is an indispensable tool for intellectuals, and one that stimulates in addition the habit of close attention to language, which is one of the things necessary for effective writing, not to mention clear thinking. Further, an understanding of how language really works (in contrast to the linguistic mythologies usually taught in schools) gives one a metaphorical place to stand that facilitates the study of anything that is described in language, which means just about everything.

Over the last century, linguistic scientists have amassed an array of analytic procedures, concepts, and findings that allow one to de-mystify speech, grammar, and language use, and to discover a number of surprising facts about one's own and others' languages. This course is a medium-sized (maximum 60) 4-credit intensive introduction to the methods linguists use for describing languages (although general training in analytic thought is our ultimate goal).

Drawing on examples from a large number of the world's languages, we will devote about two weeks to each of the major areas of linguistic analysis, in order:

Morphology;

Phonetics;

Phonology;

Syntax;

Semantics;

Pragmatics.

By focusing simultaneously on language data, and on the techniques used to make sense of these data, we will see that our understanding of the object of inquiry (language) is influenced by our methods of inquiry.

There will be frequent quizzes and daily data analysis problems, which will form the context for our discussion. In addition, there will be comprehensive midterm and final take-home exams, which may be done in groups. This course is especially recommended for those with interests in scientific analysis (including mathematics, computing, and engineering), since the analytic methods discussed are generalizable easily.

There is no textbook; materials for analysis and handouts are in a course pack. Students who would like a textbook to study should invest in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, available at all local bookstores. No prerequisites except an interest in language and thinking.

Section 001.

From time immemorial human beings have been curious about what appears to be a uniquely human possession, human language – about its structure, its diversity, its use, and its effects on others. This course explores the human capacity for language. We begin with a discussion of the uniqueness of human language and then review major aspects of language structure common to all human languages: sound systems, words and their meanings, sentence structures and meaning. We will then examine child language development, sentence processing, and language change; finally, we will extend our results to discussions of language variation, including social and political attitudes toward language (for instance, what is "Standard English", and is it better than other dialects of English? And should English become the official national language of the United States?). Course requirements include regular homework assignments, one midterm exam, and a final exam.

Section 001.

Students will continue to learn communicative structures of American Sign Language (ASL) and develop further skills in the use of physical space to recognize and express various meanings. Vocabulary and idiomatic expressions will be expanded to cover increasingly varied settings. Students completing Ling. 251 will be able to communicate in ASL in a range of conversational interactions. Regular attendance is essential. Participation in class includes situational role playing and class presentations.

Section 001.

This course considers how verbal and visual advertising messages are interpreted by consumers in a cultural context. 40% of the course is spent on analysis of familiar products and services such as cars, diamonds, and banks. Consumers typically have contradictory desires regarding such products (e.g., a car should be roomy yet compact, and sporty yet comfortable). This is further complicated by the ambivalent attitude of audiences to advertising communications in general. Another 40% of the course is spent showing how this rhetorical framework accounts for the deployment of formal resources, such as photographic styles and typeface selections, in magazine ads. The remaining 20% is spent in creative competitions where small groups of students design semi-finished magazine ad drafts. No artistic experience is expected and the course is not open to students from the School of Art. Linguistics 210 is not a prerequisite.

Section 001.

This course explores two fundamental aspects of the sounds of human languages: speech sounds as physical entities (phonetics) and speech sounds as linguistic units (phonology). In viewing sounds as physical elements, the focus is articulatory descriptions: How are speech sounds made? What types of articulatory movements and configurations are used to differentiate sounds in the world's languages? In this part of the course, the goal is to learn to produce, transcribe, and describe in articulatory terms many of the sounds known to occur in human languages. In the next part of the course, the focus is on sounds as members of a particular linguistic system. Phonological data from a wide range of languages are analyzed – that is, regularities or patterns in sound distribution are extracted from the data set and then stated within a formal phonological framework. We also will construct arguments to support the proposed analyses, and will find that phonetic factors play a crucial role in validating phonological analyses. Throughout the course, a major emphasis is that speech sounds are simultaneously physical and linguistic elements, and that these two aspects of sound structure are interdependent. Class sessions will consist of lectures/labs, phonetic practice, and interactive discussions of phonological data sets.

Section 001.

This course introduces the foundations of generative syntactic inquiry. Students will learn how formal syntactic analyses of certain aspects of English syntax are constructed, as well as about the ways that human languages are the same (rather than about how they may appear to differ). Through this course, students will become familiar with questions concerning cognitive capacities, mind vs. brain, knowledge vs. behavior, and the difference between studying "languages" vs. investigating human cognitive capacities (such as the human capacity to acquire natural language systems). Requirements include regular, short written assignments, a midterm, and a final.

Section 001.

This course introduces the elementary components of a theory of meaning for human language. The theory of meaning explored here is "truth-functional," meaning we are taking the approach that the function of language is basically classificational – linguistic expressions (words, predicates, sentences) serve to classify reality into what is the case and what isn't the case. The components we will study in detail are predicate and propositional logic, models and the reference of nouns, pronouns and predicates, and the meanings of quantifiers. We will also discuss lexical semantics and types of events as well as topics in discourse pragmatics such as types of anaphora and the topic/focus distinction. Most of the issues we will explore in this course revolve broadly around the relationship between the structure of linguistic expressions (their syntax) and their meaning.

Section 001.

Languages enable us to record history, but languages themselves are also products of history, and of prehistory. Many clues about the past are to be found in the vocabulary and structure of individual languages. Much can also be deduced from how languages are distributed in space, and how they are related to each other. Through readings and hands-on exercises, this course will introduce students to the basic methods of historical linguistics (including reconstruction of extinct languages, dialect geography, and mathematical methods), and apply them to examples drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including areas of current research and controversy.

Human languages, especially those spoken by members of unfamiliar and distant cultures, appear on the surface to be very
different from one another. But closer examination reveals that languages differ in systematic ways and that more than half of them can be divided into a relatively small number of basic types. In this course we will identify and study some of these basic
patterns and explore possible reasons for their existence, seeking explanations where possible in the communicative function of
language as well as in the historical evolution of languages. The course will introduce students to basic grammatical structure and function by (1) having them investigate unfamiliar
languages through study of published descriptive grammars and (2) relating this direct experience to the principle findings of
contemporary typological research. Coursework will consist of:

readings and lectures on the major categories and parameters which are used to define language types,

the completion of a number of short assignments or reports on given phenomena as they are manifested in the languages that students will adopt,

discussion and comparison of these individual findings in class,

a midterm exam, and

a course paper examining a particular typological parameter in one or more languages.

Toward the end of the course students will make a ten minute oral presentation to the class of a pre-final version of their term papers.

Section 001 – Meets with College Honors 250.001.

In this course, we will explore many aspects of academic discourse including "going behind the scenes" to see how experts write and read research and scholarly genres. In so doing, we will be using various methodologies such as discourse analysis, quantitative studies of grammatical structures and lexical items, observations, and corpus linguistics and concordancing. There will also be three "field trips" to "out of the way" academic units on campus. Our combined investigations should help us answer better such questions as:

Is academic speech more like casual conversation or academic prose?;

Is the role of English as the increasingly dominant global academic language a positive or negative development?

How does written academic discourse vary according to audience, discipline, national tradition, etc?

What can we learn from academic humor and parody?

What are the rhetorical characteristics of undergraduate textbooks, course descriptions, etc?

As a result of these investigations, participants will be able to raise their own awareness of academic writing and speaking, and hence improve their own performances in these areas.

Section 001.

This course examines language as a social phenomenon, focusing on the ways in which variation in language form and use can enhance our understanding of social processes. The course will give an overview of various approaches and issues related to the role of language in society. In studying language variation, we will see how a person's background and identity shape the ways in which they speak and they ways in which they perceive the speech of others. Topics related to these questions include quantitative approaches to language variation and change, registers (varieties tied to particular contexts), and the different regional, social, and ethnic varieties of English including African American English and Chicano English, and the relationships between language, gender, and sexual orientation and the sociolinguistics of signed languages. The course will also consider the effects of multilingualism on individuals and society, including bi-/multilingualism, diglossia, and code-switching. We will look at the effects of language contact situations, including the emergence and structure of pidgin and Creole languages, the process of language death, and attempts to preserve and maintain minority languages. Finally, we will consider the role of sociolinguistics research in understanding the relationship between language and power, including the application of sociolinguistics research to education and language politics and language planning.

Section 001.

A number of interesting issues can be dealt with in a course on bilingualism, all of great current relevance. Examples are acquisition of language(s) by children in bilingual families; the bilingual brain; aspects of bilingual knowledge/competence; multilingualism
and multiculturalism in the United States; attitudes towards bilingualism. Students will be encouraged to work where relevant with their own languages and endeavor systematically to frame their own experience of bilingualism.

Section 001.

This course is a brief acquaintance with 150 languages and peoples of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Caucasus – "a mountain of languages." Topics will include:

Spread of the Russian language in Siberia, Caucasus, and Central Asia, as compared with the expansion of English in America

Russification policy in the former Soviet Union

Languages of Eastern Europe and Russia under dictatorship

Language as a weapon: forbidden books, songs, and anecdotes as a tool which ultimately brought down the Communist system in Eastern Europe and Russia

Cultural differences between peoples speaking different languages

National character as seen through the language: differences in the meaning of the words FREEDOM, FRIENDSHIP, EMOTION in Russian and in English

Russian and East European languages today: a massive borrowing from American English

Recent achievements in language study in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Specialists in the area as well as singers of native songs will be invited. Several video films will be shown. Students will be evaluated by their discussion in class, as well as by their written homework.

Section 001 – Meets with Linguistic 551.001.

This introductory course will focus on theories of second language acquisition and how they relate to second language development and teaching. The course will cover some of the major topics within second language acquisition research and will provide students with experience in data analysis and interpretation. While much of the literature focuses on the acquisition of English, examples and analysis of other language data will be discussed. The course is intended for all students interested in understanding and evaluating proposed models of second language acquisition. Undergraduates should register for Linguistics 351 and graduates for 551. Both courses will meet together with additional work for 551 credit.

Section 001.

Prerequisites & Distribution: Not intended for Linguistics concentrators. Not open to students with credit for Ling. 211. (3). (Excl).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human natural language, and has intrinsic connections to related fields such as anthropology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and studies of particular languages. The results of linguistics are also increasingly being applied to problems in those fields as well as in computer science, language teaching, and others. This course is a sophisticated overview to the field for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in related areas of scientific and humanistic inquiry. We will cover the major subfields of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as those areas of linguistics that interface closely with other social and behavior sciences, such as sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Readings will come from both the primary literature and a selection of textbook materials. Requirements will include exams and a paper.

Section 002 – Montana Salish. Meets with Ling 792.002.

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.

This seminar focuses on Montana Salish, one of about two dozen languages of the Salishan language family of the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana). These languages, all of them gravely endangered, have structural features that are unusual in the world's languages, notably consonant clusters as long as eight consonants, pharyngeal consonants, lexical suffixes, very elaborate verbal morphology, and a weak lexical distinction between nouns and verbs. The course will begin with introductory lectures on the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax of Montana Salish, and continue with translation and analysis of texts. Students, working either alone or in groups, will prepare a term paper on some aspect of Salish structure. The term paper will count for half of the course grade; the other half of the grade will be based on active participation in class discussions, including in-class presentations on students' research projects. Ideally, the students in this seminar will have had at least one course in phonetics or phonology and one course in syntax; interested students without this background should consult the instructor before enrolling. There is no textbook for the course. Assigned readings will include the instructor's draft grammar lessons and articles from the scholarly literature on this and other Salishan languages.

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.

In an age when computers and the Internet have made their way into daily life, there is a large demand for tools to make that daily interaction as simple and efficient as possible. That is one of the goals of Computational Linguistics, a field that covers any computational approaches to linguistics and language research, both from a theoretical and from an application viewpoint. More specifically, the term Computational Linguistics is often used interchangeably with Natural Language Processing (NLP), its major area of application. NLP corresponds to the design of artificial mechanisms or machinery to manipulate human language on an automatic basis or, more often, to be used as more natural and efficient interfaces between humans and computers. This course has two components: (i) it covers NLP research in the areas of morphology, syntax, semantics and the lexicon; (ii) it provides a short introduction to programming, with assignments directed to NLP. Some topics the students will become familiar with are finite state automata and regular expressions, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, context-free grammars, tools for sentence parsing, semantic analysis and unification. The course also introduces natural language applications in information extraction/retrieval and machine translation. This can be taken as a beginning course in the field, but it is also useful for students who want to be able to use computers to manipulate human language as their object of study in different fields. No pre-requisites necessary, although students who have not taken any linguistics courses are encouraged to take at least a 200-level course concurrently (this can be discussed with the instructor, email pires@umich.edu).

Section 001.

The objective is to understand how "rhetors" such as political leaders use language and visual imagery to impress, influence, and persuade a general public. Primary objects of analysis are speeches and debates. We show how successful rhetorical events tap into collective memories of prior events (literary and historical). We begin with the ancient world (Cicero, the Iliad), then consider a chronological sequence of American speeches from Washington to the present. Orations by Lincoln and M.L. King, Jr., are studied in cultural and political context. Debates from Lincoln-Douglas to Gore-Perot are then analysed, followed by brief coverage of modern political advertising. Shakespearean battlefield oratory, and academic polemic, are also worked in. Aristotle and Cicero, with help from Robert Hariman ("Political Styles") and Kenneth Burke, provide a partial theoretical grounding, but the emphasis is on open-ended textual analysis rather than on philosophical reflection. Open to undergraduates with instructor's permission.

Section 001.

Phonology studies the sound system of human languages. This course introduces the fundamental concepts in phonology. Topics include distinctive features, phonological rules, prosodic structure (syllable, stress, tone, intonation), multi-tiered phonology, feature geometry, underspecification, and Optimality Theory. Both theory and problem-solving ability will be emphasized. Besides readings for class, weekly exercises constitute an important part of the course. In addition, there is a final project on a selected topic.

Prerequisite: Linguistics 313 or 512, or permission of the instructor.

Requirements:

Problem sets:60%

Final project:40%

Abstract 5%

Draft 10%

Presentation 10%

Final paper 15%

The final project can be on any phonological topic of your own choice. The topic should be selected at least four weeks before the end of classes. An abstract is due at least two weeks before the end of classes. Every student is expected to give a short presentation (10 minutes or so) of your final project towards the end of the course.

All assignments should be handed in on time; late ones will either get a lower grade or no grade.

Section 001.

This course introduces three tools for semantic analysis, their relation to current issues in semantic theory, and their relation to an overall picture of what meaning is and how it is encoded in natural language. The three tools are: predicate and propositional logic, generalized quantifier theory, and type theory. These tools are couched in the truth-functional approach to what meaning is, according to which language is basically classificational – linguistic expressions (words, predicates, sentences) serve to classify reality into what is the case and what isn't the case.

With these tools, we will explore current issues in semantics including the relation between syntax and semantics (compositionality), the scope of quantifiers, quantifier types, monotonicity, conservativity, presuppositionality, intensionality, event types, and types of anaphora.

Human languages, especially those spoken by members of unfamiliar and distant cultures, appear on the surface to be very
different from one another. But closer examination reveals that languages differ in systematic ways and that more than half of them can be divided into a relatively small number of basic types. In this course we will identify and study some of these basic
patterns and explore possible reasons for their existence, seeking explanations where possible in the communicative function of
language as well as in the historical evolution of languages. The course will introduce students to basic grammatical structure and function by (1) having them investigate unfamiliar
languages through study of published descriptive grammars and (2) relating this direct experience to the principle findings of
contemporary typological research. Coursework will consist of:

readings and lectures on the major categories and parameters which are used to define language types,

the completion of a number of short assignments or reports on given phenomena as they are manifested in the languages that students will adopt,

discussion and comparison of these individual findings in class,

a midterm exam, and

a course paper examining a particular typological parameter in one or more languages.

Toward the end of the course students will make a ten minute oral presentation to the class of a pre-final version of their term papers.

Section 001.

Students will be introduced to methods of studying the relationships between language variation and social structure and to the major findings of sociolinguists who have examined these relationships. The course will focus largely (but not exclusively) on the quantitative methods developed by Labov, which are designed to reveal the way language change is rooted in synchronic variation. Socially sensitive models of language change will be considered. The class will study reports of research which focus variously on everyday social interaction, on larger scale patterns of social dialect variation, and on patterns of code choice in bidialectal and bilingual communities. Relationships between language and social class, language and gender, and language and ethnicity will be discussed. Others topics covered will be language and style and larger scale social, educational and political issues associated with the process of language standardization. All students will carry out a small-scale piece of original sociolinguistic research and will be offered the opportunity to contribute to projects currently in progress in Detroit area speech communities.

Section 001 – Meets with Linguistic 351.001.

This introductory course will focus on theories of second language acquisition and how they relate to second language development and teaching. The course will cover some of the major topics within second language acquisition research and will provide students with experience in data analysis and interpretation. While much of the literature focuses on the acquisition of English, examples and analysis of other language data will be discussed. The course is intended for all students interested in understanding and evaluating proposed models of second language acquisition. Undergraduates should register for Linguistics 351 and graduates for 551. Both courses will meet together with additional work for 551 credit.